Читать книгу The Colossus of Arcadia - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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This night of the Princess’s dinner party was one of the most successful gala nights of the season at Monte Carlo. Two minor Royalties and one major Royalty had been dining at villas in the neighbourhood and the house parties from all three arrived almost simultaneously. The distinguished staff of officials attached to the Administration took on a new aspect of graciousness and amiability. Baron Domiloff had a pleasant word even for those he was accustomed to snub mildly. The newspaper magnate who was reported to have invested the whole of his great fortune in the place during the last few years lost his haggard appearance and seemed never tired of looking around him with absolute content. The Baccarat table was a glittering circle of beautiful, marvellously gowned women wearing their jewels fearlessly and with great effect. Famous men of every nationality were to be met with at every corner, with just a few, perhaps, whom the chances of life had pitch-forked into the wrong places, spoiling what would otherwise have been a perfect atmosphere. The piles of chips in front of those who were playing high were amazing. Townleyes indulged in a little grimace as he produced the minimum—a hundred thousand francs—for his bank.

“When you have won that, my friends,” he remarked to his intimates who had gathered round, “I shall retire and go back to rest. Someone has been moving about my boat and I am uneasy. Come to think of it, Princess, I fear your last two letters to me are lying about somewhere.”

“You men are terrible,” she declared. “You are always forcing us into the hands of the blackmailers. Utterly callous about it, too. To save my reputation, however, confess that we only met a few days ago and that they were both of them invitations to dinner!”

“One to lunch,” he corrected her. “But unfortunately,” he added with a sigh, “both on the most non-compromising of cards and unsigned. Voilà.”

“Messieurs et Mesdames,” the croupier announced, “la banque est ouverte.”

The game commenced. The first three coups Townleyes won on both sides. It was not until the quiet but not undistinguished-looking man with the grey hair and strangely low voice had slipped into the place which had been kept for him and thrust out his bet of five mille that the fortunes of the game changed. Ardrossen’s side of the table began to win. Whether it was he who took the cards or not—he staked—he won. The Princess touched one of the officials upon the arm and asked his name. The man leaned down confidentially.

“He is a Monsieur Ardrossen, Your Highness,” he confided. “English, one believes, but he speaks every language.”

“An habitué?”

“Parfaitement. He speaks to very few people but he likes to gamble.”

“He plays very well,” the Princess admitted. “Very quietly, too. Some day I must meet him.”

“He will esteem it a great honour, Your Highness,” the croupier murmured, passing on with a farewell bow.

Lord Henry, from a standing up place behind the Princess, was content with his modest mille each time the cards were dealt. The Princess played according to the school of moderate gamblers. She left her stake and her winnings on until after the third coup, then she drew them away and started again with her initial unit of ten mille. Ardrossen’s game was more mechanical. He drew in his winnings and added them to his little pile but his stake winning or losing remained always the same—five mille. He followed always the approved tenets of the best players. He took up his cards promptly as soon as they were dealt and he never hesitated as to his course of action when he held a doubtful hand. Not a muscle of his face ever moved even when he laid down, as he frequently did, a natural nine against the banker. There was no exultation about his winning, no depression when he lost.

“The most robotlike gambler,” Lord Henry declared, “I ever knew in my life. Can’t see how he can enjoy it.”

“You are a little peevish, mon ami, because you have been losing,” the Prince, who was enormously wealthy but who played the same sort of modest game, observed.

“Of course I am,” his friend agreed. “What is the good of gambling at all if you are not peevish when you lose and happy when you win? Gambling is worth while simply because the exultation of winning lasts longer than the depression of losing. Observe the joy with which I take up these four mille. Let’s go to the bar and have a drink. The professional will be coming on at two o’clock and I would always rather win from those Johnnies.”

The two men strolled away together towards the bar, which was just then packed with people. Every table was taken and the most polyglot crowd in the world were jammed together at the two oval counters, one at each end of the room, and in all the places where there was an inch or two to breathe. Ardrossen, who had been standing patiently against the wall, moved quietly up to where the American girl was drinking a lemon squash at a small round table for two.

“Mademoiselle is perhaps expecting a friend?” he asked with a slight bow, his fingers resting upon the unoccupied chair.

“No such luck, Monsieur,” she answered.

“You permit me that I sit down then?” he ventured. “I find the atmosphere of these rooms somewhat fatiguing.”

“I wonder whether you remember me?” she asked curiously.

He looked at her with slightly upraised eyebrows.

“I believe I saw you on the train,” he reflected. “You will pardon me if I am mistaken.”

“I was on the Blue Train,” she admitted. “We sat not far away in the dining car—but I have seen you before then.”

“I regret very much,” he said tonelessly. “My memory seems to be at fault.”

“I saw you about two months ago,” she told him, “sitting at a corner table at the Café de l’Univers in Geneva.”

He shook his head.

“I am afraid that was not possible, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Geneva is one of the few continental resorts which I have never visited.”

She accepted his statement without demur.

“That is strange,” she said indifferently. “I have rather a good memory for faces and you—I mean the person I thought was you—were with a man whom everyone was talking about those days.”

“Yes?”

“Litinoff—the Russian, you know.”

“I have read about him,” Mr. Ardrossen admitted, “but I have certainly never sat at a table with him any more than I have ever visited Geneva. You yourself were there for a long time, Mademoiselle?”

“A few months only,” she answered. “I was doing a little very amateurish newspaper work. The bureau came to an end, however, and my occupation was gone. I was on the point of taking my departure for home when a fortunate accident happened.”

“Tell me about it,” he begged. “One is often hearing of the ill luck of one’s acquaintances. It would be a novelty to hear of someone whom chance has befriended.”

She laughed.

“It befriended me all right,” she acknowledged. “I had a legacy just when I needed it, just when I thought I would have to go back home and rejoin my maiden aunts in Washington.”

“That,” he remarked, “was opportune.”

“I should say so,” she agreed. “I don’t want to find fault with it but all the same it was one of those awkward-sized legacies,—you know what I mean, I’m sure,—too small to invest with the idea of adding to one’s income, and too large to ignore. I decided to give myself a holiday.”

“You chose an excellent spot,” he observed.

The waiter, whom it really seemed as though Ardrossen had mesmerized into his act of service, brought two champagne cocktails and set them down. Ardrossen handed him a note and ignored alike the change and the man’s profuse thanks.

“Yes, it is a wonderful place to visit,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t know that it is very cheerful for anyone arriving alone and without friends.”

“It is scarcely probable,” he said, “that you will remain in that unenviable situation. To-night, for instance, I think I saw you dancing with Lord Henry Lancaster. He knows everyone here.”

“He assured me,” she replied, “that he was one of the props of the whole establishment and that he had been practically asked by the manager to act as chaperon to anyone in need of one. I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was until he introduced himself and I don’t suppose I should have danced with him, especially as he belonged to another party. He was very charming, however, and I love dancing. He seems to know all the gossip of the place, too. A good deal of what he told me will be useful.”

“Useful?” Ardrossen repeated speculatively.

“A newspaper has agreed to pay my expenses here if I can send them a few items of news. Perhaps you, too, might help me.”

Something as near a smile as Ardrossen ever permitted himself parted his lips. The eyes of the two met for a moment. The girl stooped down, fumbling in her bag for a cigarette.

“Why should you not help a struggling journalist?” she queried. “You don’t give anyone the idea of being exactly a social butterfly, but I expect you have been here heaps of times before and you must know a good many of the people.”

“The people whom I know,” he replied, “would not, I fear, be interesting to the readers of your newspaper.”

“You are not an American, are you?”

“I am not. I am English.”

“Why did you speak to me just now?”

“Because I wanted your chair. I was tired and I needed to sit down.”

She leaned back in her seat and laughed softly.

“I should never suspect you of being a boulevardier,” she told him. “Still, it seemed odd to have you making overtures to anyone. At the two cafés in Geneva where I imagined that I saw you, or rather at the café and the restaurant, you occupied always the same table; you spoke—if one heard your voice at all—in exactly the same tone, you wore the same sort of clothes, you covered those rather penetrating grey eyes of yours with the thickest of glasses. You just passed from place to place looking at no one—always with the air of one who wished to remain apart.”

“So I, or rather my double, earned nicknames?”

“You did,” she admitted.

“Such as?”

“They got boiled down to one in time,” she told him. “They all called you ‘The Shadow.’”

She knocked the ash from the cigarette she had been smoking.

“‘The Shadow’?” he repeated curiously. “I wonder why? I am not a poseur in any way. The trend of my daily life is always, I think, quite natural. I have an idea that I must seem a hopelessly obvious person to anyone who took the trouble to watch my movements.”

“That, I suppose,” she reflected, looking at her rose-tipped fingernails, “must be the reason. You evidently don’t read fiction, Mr. Ardrossen, or you would know that the old-fashioned type of spy is extinct. A spy nowadays is an insignificant, harmless little man with the appearance of a city clerk, or a blond, loquacious sort of a person looking all the time like a carpetbagger. Even your retiring habits would be out of fashion for the real international disciple of espionage.”

“‘The Shadow,’” he reflected. “I still wonder why they called my double that—especially you.”

Her delicate eyebrows were slightly raised. She looked at him with a puzzled gleam in her clear brown eyes.

“Why especially me?” she asked.

Again there was the beginning of that elusive smile which never developed. He pressed his cigarette into the ashtray and rose to his feet.

“I was forgetting,” he said, “that I have kept a seat at the Baccarat. I must hurry or I shall lose it. I will say au revoir, Miss Haskell.”

“So you know my name!” she exclaimed.

“Could I help it,” he answered, “when I have heard all those introductions? Thank you so much for the few minutes’ rest—and your company.”

He left her with a little bow. His departure was so quiet and unostentatious that she scarcely realized until she looked at his empty chair that she was alone.